My problem isn't falling asleep - it's waking up. Honestly it's always been a big problem for me and affects many aspects of my life. Friends who come over to visit my husband while I'm taking a nap are amazed (and probably irritated) by how long it takes me to hear the alarm. It varies anywhere from 5 minutes to 30 minutes of both alarms blaring, one of which is extra loud and hurts my ears when I'm awake. Thank goodness I have a husband now, and an extremely patient one at that, who can help me get up in the mornings so I don't miss my classes.

Anyone else have this problem?

I use to before I had kids abd a job that needed me to be wake by 4:30am. I jump right out of bed now ready for the day....Sick, aren't I ? .... :D

This goesalso for those night when I have trouble staying asleep and only get 3 or 4 hours of sleep. :eek:

I am a dope when I get up. I've never been a morning person. However that's the time of day I need to be up and making room for things like meditation and exercise. Maybe if I went to bed earlier.... heh
ian

I totally agree with pinkie on this one!! I set 3 alarms and will sleep through them... I've also got a morning wake up call! Sometimes my friend will have to call me a couple of times before I answer! VERY frustrating when I have to be at work or school and I can NOT be late!

It is starting to get harder and harder for me to get going in the mornings I will hit the snooz for at least 1 hour and I am scared it will get worse and affect my life

I've never been so useful so early in the day. I think it's the intence exercise I'm getting. I'm waking at 7:00 am and I'm ready to go. How weird! The more fit I become the more awake I am in the early hours. However a heavy hit of carbs can wipe that good feeling out with ease.
ian

I sleep through really loud thunderstorms and my husband will be amassed at how i won't wake up.actually i'm snoring.I lay my head on that pillow and i'm gone until the morning.My poor husband is always having sleep problems.Yes alarms are ringing,but i can't hear it and if i do the alarm becomes part of my dream.I wonder if we(adder's) dream very deeply,cause i do.

i can sleep through the gales we have here in england with no trouble. it's a standing joke in my family about how it can take me to wake in the mornings. have had dreams of waking up many times before i eventually manage to do so.

i've noticed i am much slower to get around in the morning.....is this perhaps an effect of the adderall that will pass. obvioulsy, i am staying awake much later....so i was just wondering if it was a result of that.

I cannot hear alarm clocks, i dont care how loud they are.

Jon

i don't hear them anymore either, and i used to wake up before they ever went off.

I preapologize just in case I offend anyone, but it just makes me laugh to imagine all of us, an army of non-waking, grouchy, alarm-slammin' sleepyheads running like wild in the mornings to make it to work/school everyday. Man, wouldn't traffic be EXCITIN' if we all lived in the same city? :D

lol, !

Oooh yeah.....I definetly can't wake up either. I actually set my alarm up to half an hour earlier to give me more time to wake up slowly, so I can lounge in bed half unconcious for half an hour and still be ontime. It is also set to repetitively ring every ten minutes until I disable that function.

Every Morning I have suicidal thoughts. Lasts about 2-3 hours then I"m good.

T-Bass

a while ago, I kept finding that I would wake up way too late and my alarm clock would be turned off when I was sure I had turned it on the previous night. Then I started putting in a drawer across the room, and found that sometimes I would vaguely remember going over to turn it off, and then dropping back into bed. It was as though it was not quite real, like I was in a dream. I can get up now if I have to because I have a system in which I have four alarm clocks in the room including one on a high shelf, for which I have to to retrieve a chair from accross the room and stand on it to turn the thing off. That is usually enough to make me concious.

I used to keep my alarm clock on a dresser across the room, but I would turn it off and go back to sleep regardless of where I put it.

Although I know that 4 alarms would probably annoy me awake, I've chosen not to do it and continue to twiddle the alarm beside my bed as if there was some "magic" time setting technique I'd overlooked.

It's completely ineffective, of course, and yet I persist. I drive myself nuts over it.

Its a known thing in my family that I could sleep through 9.5 earth quake...I'll even have whole conversations in my sleep, answering questions with seeming coherence...people will ask me if I want oatmeal...just to show up five minutes later with the porridge to find me asleep and dreaming. I won't even remember asking for the food!

I find the more I keep to a routined bed/waking time the easier it is to get up...But still, I'll sleep all the way through an alarm, including the part where I put it off!! I also do the whole "set the alarm half an hour early just to take some time to wake up" thing.

Helps to put the alarm in the kitchen or some other room( near the coffee machine, hehe). Also light makes a difference...you get these automatic timed false daylight lights that switch on gradually as it approaches your wakeup time, simulating sunlight, and this actually sends signals to the brain to begin the process of "switching on" before getting up. Remember, your body releases powerful muscle relaxants and sleep drugs when you sleep to keep you unconcious, and I figure ADD people need to give their body more time to break free of those chemicals, our brain chemistry being a little off whack and all...

It reminds me of Johnny Lee Miller in the movie Hackers..."Can this wait till both my eyes are open?"

Also, when on antidepressants or other meds, my sleep/wake cycle sometimes adjusts better to day/night instead of my usual nocturnal nature.

Are you also more nocturnal??

I find I can sit up and play pc games till four in the morning like a zombie, and my brain just doesn't go to sleep unless I force myself to lie down and chill out and practice my relaxation techniques. I have to really discipline myself to sleep regular hours...cause if I skip a few hours, I end up sleeping 18 hours in a day just to feel alert again. Its like my whole sleep cycle goes to pot if I overclock myself even a little. Lack of sleep makes me really *****y and irritable, plus I kinda get more absentminded and all my ADD symptoms are a hundred times worse.

You also so sensitive to sleep loss?

My morning ritual has to be real rigid to prevent anything going wrong or being forgotten...I put everything right before bedtime, cause I know in the morning I'll leave my underwear behind if it isn't set out ready to pull on while semi concious. I still have a hard time getting my Asperger's hubby to use the same tactic...makes for interesting times!!!

I wonder how the average ADD sleep cycle compares to normal people...do we sleep deeper, dream more or less? Do we need more sleep? Is it physically harder for us to fall asleep? I wonder, since it is known that memory and mathematical proficiency is severly affected by sleep loss...could some of the ADD symptoms we experience be secondary effects that are actually caused by some sleep related abnormality caused by our funky brain chemistry?

Whizper

Without stimulants awakeing, even from a nap, could be as traumatic as being born. It feels like I'm returning from another planet. Adderall helps me sleep better (I think I remember my dreams better and they make more sense) - It allows me to wake up without an alarm clock. It seems that now I only go to the moon when I sleep, instead of to a distant planet.

Every Morning I have suicidal thoughts. Lasts about 2-3 hours then I"m good.

T-Bass Wow dude. Before I got on the current streak of med cocktail/no illegal drugs, and taking care of myself, I was exact same way! Before meds I would always be in a state of feelings terrible but it was more pronounced in the morning and would ease towards evening. But for years, including about 20 different drugs/cocktails, I would feel better during the day but would wake up every single morning with a mind full of sadness and irritible/impulsive suicidal thoughts. No matter how much better I felt during the day and evening, the next day I would want to die very badly.

There is some good research indicating that individuals that feel severely depressed in the morning but gain efficacy and improved mood throughout the day have a variant of depression that responds very well to sleep deprivation therapy. In addition, there is evidence accumulating that these individuals respond well to sleep-phase backwards shift therapy in combination with medication. Problem with sleep deprivation is it results in complete relapse with recovery sleep. New strategies are being devised to try to maintain the response. A study showed combination of sleep deprivation then subsequent sleep-phase shift over a week was effective. Combinations of antidepressants and sleep dep have shown better results than either alone. In addition, modafinil has been shown in cases to help sustain sleep dep response because maintaining conciousness during sleep dep for depressed individuals is especially hard, particularly on a chronic basis.

These individuals seem to be characterized by lethargy, fatigue, irritability, anxiety, severe anhedonia, pronounced cognitive problems, interpersonal sensitivty, etc.

For me, the only reason these medications work for me at all is because I work very hard to try and keep my sleep in decent shape. Decent for me is still crappy for most people. But some general guidelines are: Don't go to sleep past 4 a.m.; don't sleep more than 8 hours (preferably 6-7); and don't wake up past 11a.m.. If I follow the guidelines stringently, I feel fantastic, but I can get so excited with my experience of actual feeling things, especially positive emotions, that I will overindulge and screw things up. If I go a few days of missing the guidelines a bit too much I can crash hard and get severely depressed. I go back to agitation, anxiety, anhedonia, and lack of any motivation. I feel like dying and the impulsive thoughts of suicide return. Getting back to feeling okay after that is very difficult and usually requires a night of sleeping 3-4 hours and running myself ragged.

The way I shift around used to make me think I was bipolar, and plenty of psychiatrists have suggested just that. But I'm not, I'm just a wierd depressive with the complication of ADHD.

I can't sleep at night and be awake during the day without a lot of medication. It just isn't natural for me. I know how people keep talking about how wonderful sunlight is for your mind, but I find that it makes me depressed, and hurts my eyes. If it is hot weather it is twice as bad (where I live it is hot during the day and cools off at night much of the year). I am hypersensitive to sensory stimuli in general and this seems to have much to do with it.

you should read some of speedo's posts, sparrow, he is super sensory stimulated as well.

I have no real understanding for why I might have the morning sleep in problem I do...I'm not ADD..maybe it's chemical or maybe something else?.